Various mechanisms exist for administering the configuration of platforms in an enterprise. In corporate environments, or other network environments, such as ones administered by an information technology (IT) group, there are often times when it is desirable to turn on or off certain features in an administered platform. In one example, it may be desired to disable the universal serial bus (USB) port. However, some platforms may not have a USB port, so a command to disable the USB port would not be applicable for those platforms. In some platforms, this command may be an invalid request. Typically, existing systems use one agent to request these configuration changes with one or more remote targets. In existing systems, an administrator may communicate to one or several remote targets that are well known. However, the configuration request commands need to be hard-coded for individual platforms.
In one environment, a network may have 20 or more different SKU (stock keeping unit) platforms that need to be configured. Each individual SKU platform may require a different request protocol to disable the USB port. Thus, it may be desirable to migrate settings from one machine or set of machines to another machine or set of machines, or to have a server remotely configure and adjust configurations for many heterogeneous target platforms.
In existing systems, there has been no means of establishing a “standard” interrelationship between platform configuration settings of a variety of heterogeneous platforms. Therefore, if an administrator of a corporate network is faced with a large variety of systems with no standard means of configuring them, the administrator either would not “control” the firmware settings of the targeted platforms or if it is desired to control the various platform settings, a manual effort is necessary to establish a standard configuration for all the systems in the administered environment.